Were these the biggest stories of the year? Not necessarily. If you note, many of the stories date back to January. That means they’ve had all year to accumulate further page views, compared to some published later. But not all of them are from January.
Perhaps next year, we’ll see if there’s a way to adjust to determine the most popular stories relative to when they are published.

By the way, our most “evergreen” or non-news content that received the most visits in 2012 were: